Marcus Rediker, Slave Ship: A Human History
Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South
Laird Bergard, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba and the United States
Vernon Valentine Parker, Through the Codes Darkly: Slave Law and Civil Law in Louisiana
Philippe Girard, Toussaint L’Overture: A Revolutionary Life
Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from the Womb to the Grave

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Comment/Description

Course Description: This course will be a comparative examination of the institution of black slavery in Atlantic world societies in the Americas from the l6th through the end of the 19th century within the broader context of European colonial settlement and indigenous peoples’ varied responses to the black and white presence on their homelands. Each week takes up one overarching theme that collectively address major topics and problems that expose the complex nature of the institution and the resulting methodologies and historiography. Particular attention, therefore, will be given to the business of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa, Europe and the Americas; the installation and institutionalization of black slavery as a system of labor and control in “New World” colonial settler societies; gendered patterns of social interaction and cultural expression; and resistance strategies along with other paths to freedom. North America, including British, French and Spanish slaveholding colonies on the continent, will be the central focus of the course. Comparisons with slaveholding black societies in the British, French and Spanish Caribbean as well as Brazil and Surinam will be integral to each week’s topic for discussion.

Course Format: Each week students will engage a different topic, all significant thematically, and in the historiography, to the study of Atlantic world slavery. These topics are: the slave trade; slave labor and law; culture, kinship and community; and resistance strategies and freedom struggles. In preparation for weekly discussions, students will have a mandatory reading assignment drawn from the required monographs listed below in combination with published or online primary sources and journal literature. Class time will be taken up with my brief lectures that will introduce and contextualize the topic for discussion; assigned student oral presentations that will summarize readings and propose avenues for our larger analytical discussion that class period; analysis of related primary source materials; and interpreting relevant media clips or visual cultural materials (drawings, paintings, cartoons, online museum exhibitions, etc.) made available for their viewing.

admission settings

The course is part of admission "Hauptseminare MA/LA Gym NNG/GETK/NG SS2019".